For my next trick, ill make my transients disappear...

[Joel4662]

Yeah so I get my whole mix all good to go and start my master chain to get my loudness and energy. As I start to compress, boost gain a bit, this, that, multi band comp for bass a little I realize my drums are lost
So at this point I usually (I now realize this is wrong) bring up my drums in the mix and that causes a different problem where it's too loud here too soft there 20 minutes later I realize my mix sucks, and my drums are still lost. So I turn off my master chain and BAM my transients are SOOO much louder than everything else.
So what am I doing wrong in my mastering chain? I mess with alot of attack/release times but the limiter seems to be the biggest problem
I also do use gclip on my drums and compress them pretty hard.
This said, what should I try?

 

[ahjteam]

compress individual elements especially the snare and kick before they hit the master bus. Tho I honestly wouldn't mind an album that has a good and wide dynamic range, but in the end I think you will just end up boosting it it -6dB RMS because "louder is better". It's not. Metallica's Black album is at -15dB RMS and it still sounds loud enough.

 

[Joel4662]

compress individual elements especially the snare and kick before they hit the master bus. Tho I honestly wouldn't mind an album that has a good and wide dynamic range, but in the end I think you will just end up boosting it it -6dB RMS because "louder is better". It's not. Metallica's Black album is at -15dB RMS and it still sounds loud enough.

Yeah I usually end up between -9 and -6 rms, though I've been trying to tone it down lately.
I guess my problem with compressing drums much harder is I never like the way it sounds before mastering
But I guess it's a give-and-take battle

 

[Fandus]

Lately I've been using ozone but multiple instances on busses. One for guitars one for drums one for vocals etc then one more on the master chain purely as a limiter/dithering.

I used to get the problem your describing with waves l2 and once I moved away things got better. Some plugins can only get you 1db of gr before they start to ruin things. If your method isn't working experiment alot and you will find a better way.